Peter's Blog

NOTE: This mini list originally appeared on the Tin House Blog, but I've expanded on it here to include other books of note that I read...

Novel: It’s gigantic and serious and I’m only halfway through, but The Woman Who Lost Her Soul by Bob Shacochis is unbelievably good, absurdly ambitious and beautiful. Unfortunately, it’s not cool in a certain boring way, and I worry that people haven’t really been hearing about it as much as they should. Same thing happened with this book called Moby Dick, by this fella named Herman Melville. Consider yourself warned!

Short Story Collection: It’s been a crazy good year for collections of stories, so this is tough, but I’d have to say Laura Van Den Berg’s Isle of Our Youth. Her stories are so startling, so apt. They’re shockingly original, but they somehow manage to not come off as gimmicky.

Poetry Collection: The frowning barefoot kid on the cover of Ed Skoog’s Rough Day is his mother, circa 1939. She has her pet crow perched on her lap. In an interview, Skoog said, “The book is about a lot of things, and one is trying to reconstruct a sense of self after loss. For me that’s the passing of my mother almost 10 years ago. How to rebuild the world after rupture.”

Otherwise, I read James Arthur's remarkable and restrained Charms Against Lightning. And a lot of solo poems, scrounged out of literary journals or the internet. I seem to be reading more poetry by the month.